On view at the Parker Arts & Cultural Events Center November 5 through January 18, 2026 is “Susie Hyer: In Conversation with the Land.” Known for her representational landscape paintings, plein air artist Susie Hyer (who goes by Susiehyer), is revealing a different side of her art practice by showcasing her “secret” abstract works side-by-side with her traditional Western landscapes.
Susiehyer was kind enough to join me in an exclusive Q&A about how her new show of abstract landscapes came to be. Enjoy!
Cherie Dawn Haas: You’ve said that you’ve “worked abstractly for years, sort of secretly” in your studio. Will people be surprised to see your abstracts work now? And, why so secret?
Susiehyer: I started out as an abstract painter working in mixed-media relief wall pieces made of canvas. So I’ve always had two lines of work going, I just didn’t have anywhere to show them and the galleries that take my landscapes are a little more conservative in their representational offerings. I showed some of them once in Denver at a pop-up gallery, but that was it.
I think people are surprised that I also work abstractly, but it reinforces the other work and keeps me in the conversation about composition, structure, how your eye moves around a painting; all the same stuff you think about when you paint representative works.
Haas: Please tell us how this exhibition came to be; did you intend to show the abstract and representational works together as you created them?
Susiehyer: My curator, Rose Fredrick, came up to my studio in Evergreen and saw not just my representational work, but also my abstract paintings, which I was doing sort of in secret because my galleries didn’t want them. Rose said she was blown away.
Everything is abstract to me, and if you look at the realistic landscapes, you can see the abstract design that underlies the composition. Rose came up with the idea of illustrating how the representational works and the abstract sort of mirror each other, relate to each other, and how the paintings seem to be talking to each other. Hence the name, “In Conversation with the Land.”
When I look at a scene I want to paint, I look for abstraction as the underlying structure so there is a strength to the painting, something compelling. It’s all abstract to me anyway, it’s the way I see everything, or rather, if I can see it that way, it makes it more exciting for me to paint.
Haas: What do you hope people take away from the show (other than a new painting!)? 🙂
Susiehyer: It would be great if someone wanted to take away a new painting, and of course they are for sale. But the purpose of this exhibit is more about showing people something they may not have seen before when they look at, say, a landscape. Not the paintings themselves, but how an artist can look at something and see something the viewer didn’t see before, a way to appreciate design in a bigger, more expansive way.
It’s almost like saying, “squint down hard, blur your eyes, and obliterate the thing in front of you so you can see something without a name tag on it, an object that we have decided is called a tree, or a rock, or a canyon. Take that label off of it and see something new instead,” if that makes sense. My understanding is that Rose likes to curate exhibits that have an educational component.
I want to mention that three of the pieces in this show were collaborations with Karen Rhoal. When she lived in Denver, we would go to each other’s studios to work on the same piece together, usually a diptych. I think they are some of the most successful abstract paintings in the show. I’d love to do more collaborations; having another artist’s vision involved is very exciting.
Haas: What’s next?
Susiehyer: I’ll keep painting abstracts because it feeds my soul in a different way than the straight landscapes. I would hope I could have a place for them to land, because otherwise there will be a lot of work in the studio no one will enjoy when I leave the planet. I also draw from the figure most every week. Even though that looks like a completely different kind of work, it all goes toward influencing the landscape work in some way. I have even done some experiments with abstracting the figure, which has been great fun.
I would love to travel with this show and have some other venues host it, such as museums or art centers that might want to offer something different to their patrons. I would love for people to start thinking of Western art as art created by artists who live in and are influenced by the West, not just as a genre of art. I’d love to see some of these big Western shows include abstraction, even if it’s the same kind of images (cowboys, horses, and such).
I’ll have some work in “Icons for a New West” at Gallery 1261 this January, also curated by Rose Fredrick, and some mini paintings in the December show there. Future plans include anything else that shows up or looks inviting.
Exhibition Details:
Susie Hyer: In Conversation with the Land
November 5–January 18, 2026
Parker Arts & Cultural Events Center
Parker, Colorado
parkerarts.org
www.susiehyerstudio.com
